Wednesday, July 12, 2006

I know it's two years gone, but we should still be concerned if we can't manage to have free and fair voting in two Presidential elections. Never mind whether Kerry would have won or not, people were thoroughly outraged by what happened in Florida in 2000 and I think if the shenanigans that took place in Ohio in 2004 were more widely known, they'd be plenty outraged again. The article by Rolling Stone is very in-depth and makes quite a compelling case that Republicans in Ohio tampered with the vote or obstructed voters in large enough numbers to turn the election. If that's true, someone, or a lot of someones, needs to go to jail. But read the article, research the evidence, and decide for yourself.

This passage is about the discrepancies in the exit polling, and I think is sufficient to show exactly why you should read this article:

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''